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Time goes so quickly when you are having fun. It seems like yesterday that Stu, Dave and I put £10K each of our personal savings into Red Badger and started working from our bedrooms. That was on 24th May 2010, 5 years ago, and Red Badger has come a long way since then.

In the last two years, Red Badger have been growing more than 100% year on year in terms of revenue, profit and employees. We have some great current clients in Sky, Tesco, Fortnum & Mason, Lloyds Commercial Bank and Financial Times and are doing some really interesting, cutting edge work.

Sometimes you get so busy in the now that you forget to look back at where you have come from and what you have achieved and I have to say that I am immensely proud of where Red Badger are at today. It has been an interesting journey with plenty of mistakes but we have learnt and adapted as we have grown and have achieved good success to date.

Two big reasons for Red Badger’s success are the amazing team and culture that we have built up and the fact that nearly 50 employees and 5 years later, Red Badger is still built on the same core values as it was on day one.

First I want to discuss our core principles and then we will get to our employees and culture.

Core principles

When Stu, Dave and I started Red Badger, we were not seasoned entrepreneurs. This was our first crack at running a proper business. However, we were seasoned consultants and were battle hardened enough to know what we didn’t like about how other businesses were run and how we thought we could do it better.

To illustrate to some of our more recent employees that they were living and breathing a vision from 5 years ago, I recently pointed out this blog post that I wrote just 1 month into Red Badger’s existence, based on a term I coined ethical consulting. It was an incredibly simple blog based on one idea – we didn’t ever want to have an incentivised sales team because of the problems we felt it caused when it came to delivery. We wanted to do sales differently to the traditional way in which other companies operated. Our sales process would follow some guiding principles upon which we wanted to base the rest of the company: Quality, Value, Transparency, Honesty, Collaboration. When this blog was released, it was met by some with disdain and dismissed as being naive but still to this day, we do not have an incentivised sales team and have done perfectly well without one.

Strong opinions weakly held

A favourite mantra of Stu’s and one that ripples through Red Badger is “strong opinions weakly held”. We believed strongly in our core principles but were willing to listen and adapt if someone showed us a better way. If having no incentivised sales team hadn’t worked, we would have admitted it didn’t work and changed it. However, all three founders had a vision for how Red Badger should be run and to date it has worked and we have a great company built upon a strong foundation. A key learning is to never be afraid of trying something different if you believe in it. If it doesn’t work, or someone shows you a better way then try something else.

Doing the right thing

5 years on, our core values remain the same. We want to do the right thing. We want to provide quality and we want to provide value to our clients. If doing the right thing is at your core, increased revenue becomes a consequence.

At our last company day in the Summer of 2014, Dave our COO presented the following slide to all of our staff re-iterating that doing the right thing is paramount and the rest follows.

Doing the right thing – Company Day presentation slide.

We hang our hat on quality and don’t take on new business unless we know we can deliver it to the best of our ability. This has held us in good stead.

Looking at our current 5 concurrent clients, 2 are new but 3 we have been working with for over 12 months; Sky we have been working with since September 2013. All of these client engagements started with projects of no more than 4 months but through doing great work, the clients have continued to want to work with us for as long as is feasible.

We ask for no commitment. We just do great work by doing the right thing and as a result, end up winning lots of repeat business to supplement the new business efforts.

Core values are incredibly important but of equal importance is building a strong culture.

Culture

Of course, none of any of the successes over the last 5 years would be possible had it not been for our employees. We have built up an incredibly dynamic, talented team that are all simply a pleasure to work with. We put a hell of a lot of effort to create a great culture at Red Badger. We want Red Badger to be the best place that anyone could ever want to work at. A lofty goal but one we constantly strive for.

Recruitment

Great culture starts with recruitment. No-one gets to work at Red Badger unless we think that the existing team would love to work with them. This is a monumental effort. In the last month alone we have had 227 candidates pass the first screening stage and are currently hiring at a rate of approximately 4 per month. However, the effort is most definitely worth it in the long term. You don’t get it right 100% of the time but it is important to us to not hire the wrong person in haste because we are in a hurry to resource a new project. We’d prefer to turn the work down, be patient, hire the right people and focus on building a great culture.

Building a culture

Once you have the right people, a lot of work goes into maintaining culture and creating an environment which is great to work in. A lot of this is to do with trust. As a Director you have to let go and trust your employees to get on with it.

In Dan Pink’s “Drive”, a fantastic book about what motivates us, he talks about three key elements: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

In a nutshell, these mean the following things:

Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives

Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

These three elements are really important in creating a great culture.

Autonomy

Red Badger trust our staff to do the right thing. We don’t micromanage them, we have flexible working hours, we trust them to run projects how they see fit and we even give them a £2K training budget per year to spend on what they like. The key thing is for them to be in control of the decisions that they make day-to-day. The more autonomy you provide your staff, the more productive and happy, they tend to be.

Mastery

We also try to provide our employees with the best possible environment to collaborate and share knowledge. We explore various ways of doing this, including a monthly company meeting back at the office where everyone takes it in turn to present on key bits of knowledge, be it a demo of a client project or some thought leadership. We encourage them to innovate. We don’t take predetermined solutions to our clients but cater solutions specific to the requirements and if this means using technology that we haven’t before, that’s fine. Our staff are always driving the evolution of how Red Badger do things because they are passionate, smart people who love what they do and we don’t get in their way. To see a good example of this keep an eye on our tech page and see it evolve over time.

Purpose

Every year we also have a company day during which, we get our employees to do a workshop on our vision and purpose. The outcome of the workshop is a whole bunch of post-its written by our employees on why Red Badger exist, how we realise the why and what the tangible outcomes are. We then use the outputs of the workshop to drive our value propositions and service offerings. By doing this, all of our staff feel part of a common purpose because they have been instrumental in building it.

Why?, How?, What?

Some favourite statements written by our employees from the workshop include:

Why – “To make the internet a better place” / “Fix the nonsense”

How – “Best people, best tools, best methods and processes and always innovative consultancy”

What – “The place you go to find great software and deliver value to clients”

We hired an island!!

More important than anything is that we have lots of fun. We do lots of social events inside and outside of work. Many of our employees would consider themselves best of friends. Part of our culture is to also share the success of Red Badger with our employees when we do well and being fair with how that is distributed. This summer to commemorate our 5th birthday and to thank all of our staff for their continued contribution, we have hired an island and will be taking them all away for a full weekend of relaxation, fun and plenty of drinking. A just reward for all of their efforts and something to be really excited about!

The location of our 5th birthday party

The Badger Way

Core values, culture and great employees are key to the success of the business. By getting those things right it has allowed us to get incredibly efficient in delivering value to our clients. We have built up what we call the “Badger Way”. It is an ever evolving process through which we help big corporations to transform their business with a core focus on enterprise scale web applications. Our focus is on three key things:

Help clients to focus their efforts on being customer driven

Build a solution that delivers the best possible technology to meet the client’s requirements

Help clients to be much leaner in their approach

You can read more about the “Badger Way” elsewhere on our website in existing and upcoming ideas and blog posts.

The Future

Who knows what the future will hold but our intention is to continue in the direction in which the last 5 years have gone.

Red Badger has always set out to work with large corporations for a number of reasons, but most importantly, they have the most complex problems to solve where our ways of working can provide the most value. We thrive on complicated and we want to help large corporations feel like startups, implementing lean ways of working, cutting edge tech and delivering great customer experience to their customers.

We will look to continue to grow sustainably. As Red Badger has grown there has naturally been some growing pains. The key is not to ignore them and to make sure you are always listening to your employees. We are putting all of the right things in place to fix them.

The three founders, Stu, Dave and I are committed to our core values. We are determined to continue to hire amazing people, maintain a great culture and we want to continue to do the right thing.

Scaling excellence will not be easy but I think that Red Badger can continue to do things a little bit differently and in growth, succeed where others have failed by providing the best quality and value to our clients and have fun in doing it.

An infographic showing some of the highlights of Red Badger’s history to date.

What is an Agency?

-noun, plural a.gen.cies – an organization, company, or bureau that provides some service for another.

”Agency”, is a pretty broad term. If I say I own an “agency”, in the literal sense, I could be in recruitment, window cleaning a taxi driver or a million other occupations. Red Badger are in digital. We build enterprise scale web applications for the likes of Tesco, Sky, Lloyds and Fortnum & Mason. In my industry, most would classify Red Badger as an “agency”. We are a member company of the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) after all. But “agency” in my mind is an outdated term and is used to describe too many things.

When most of my peers, colleagues or competitors are talking about “agency”, we are specifically talking about professional services companies that are in marketing/advertising and/or the digital space. Have a look at this list of companies in the Econsultancy Top 100 Digital Agencies (Formerly NMA Top 100) to get an idea of what the industry would define an “agency” these days. There are a number of categories in this list, Full Service/Marketing, Design & Build, Technology, Creative and Media. The categorisation of companies in this list seem dubious at best and service offerings of many of them are very different, despite being placed in the same categorisation. The lines between marketing, advertising, brand, web, agency, consultancy, software house and product startup seem to have become far too blurred, all of which have been thrown into the “agency” bucket.

Origins

The term “agency” for me has it’s origins in marketing/advertising like AKQA of old, but as we have moved into the digital age, companies like AKQA have had to adapt their service offerings, adding in a strong technical capability to their armoury. AKQA were once an advertising “agency”; they now call themselves an “ideas and innovation company”. AKQA still have an “agency” arm to them as they still do a lot of brand / campaign work associated to a typical advertising “agency”. Digital or not, a campaign is not built to last. However, they now also do full service delivery of longer lasting strategic applications that have a long lasting effect on their clients’ business operations; look at AudiUSA.com. I would argue that this type of work is not that of an “agency”.

With the transition of some traditional marketing/advertising agencies to digital agency, technical companies such as Red Badger have been thrown into the “agency” bucket.

This has been something Red Badger has struggled with. We don’t see ourselves as an “agency”. As I said previously, for us, the term “agency” has its origins in the marketing space, with work largely focussed on campaigns or brand, be it digital or not. We also don’t see ourselves as “consultancy” because the connotations of that are associated to big cumbersome Tier 1 Management Consultancies such as Accenture and McKinsey.

What’s the alternative?

Red Badger deliver enterprise scale web applications for large corporations. They are highly complex, technically advanced solutions that can take upwards of 12 months to build. However, we also take User Centred Design as seriously as we do the Tech. Everything we build is user driven, beautifully designed and simple to use and we have an expert team of creatives to ensure this is the case. Finally, we wrap both the tech and creative teams into incredibly efficient Lean processes, running multi-disciplined, cross-functional teams, shipping into live multiple times a day. This is not the work of “Agency”. So for now, as a slogan to describe Red Badger, we have settled on “Experience Led Software Development Studio”.

Why does it even matter?

The overuse of the term ”Agency” can cause issues. With the ambiguity of what a modern “agency” is, comes hand-in-hand confusion of what different “agencies” do. For big corporations, the sourcing strategy for a supplier has become equally confusing because they don’t know what they are buying.

When does an “agency” become a consultancy? Or are they the same thing? How do you differentiate from a digital advertising “agency” and a software house that builds digital products? I’ll leave you to ponder on that yourselves.

Some examples of companies that might be in the “Agency” bucket but have started to move away from describing themselves as such include some of the following:

Red Badger – “Experience Led Software Development Studio”

AKQA – “Ideas and Innovation Company”

UsTwo – “Global digital product studio”

Adaptive Lab – “We’re a digital innovation company”

Companies are starting to cotton on to the fact that the term “Agency” is confusing and those that provide full service application development are starting to distance themselves from the term and the brand/marketing/advertising stigma attached to it. Surprisingly, companies such as SapientNitro and LBI still describe themselves as an “agency”.

So the question I suppose, is do you class your company as an “agency” or is it altogether something else? I think it might be time for a new term that is not “Agency” or “Consultancy” that is more interesting than “Company”. Suggestions on a stamped addressed envelope to Red Badger please!!

With Gartner results showing that in 2014 mobile and tablet sales equated to approximately 2.4 billion unit sales compared to 318 million PCs and with an ever increasing proliferation of mobile devices, for many enterprise level organisations developing an effective mobile strategy continues to be one of their biggest challenges.

So what questions are organisations currently asking themselves when devising a strategy for a successful mobile presence?

Native vs Responsive

There has been a long standing argument between the value of building native applications specific for a device such as an iPhone or Android vs. the mobile web i.e. responsive web sites that work across all devices.

The nirvana is that developers wouldn’t have to worry about devices at all and that there would be a solution to write an application once, for it to cover all use cases and work on all devices be it in the guise of a native app or a website. Unfortunately this doesn’t yet exist and Facebook’s attempt at doing this via HTML5 was followed by a rapid backtrack that was well publicised.

There are obvious pros and cons to both (you can read David’s article here for some great insight into why responsive web design is a great strategy). Native applications give you more flexibility when accessing a smartphone’s features (such as the accelerometer) and there is the obvious advantage of offline browsing. However, native applications are only built for a specific device resulting in you having to build multiple applications; development costs and ongoing maintenance escalate as a result. Responsive websites on the other hand can be built once and work on most devices (if tested properly) providing a far greater reach for less development cost. But offline browsing is not easy and user experience can often be hindered by the limitations of HTML.

At the moment there are use cases for both that solve separate concerns. If you have a complex set of requirements you may not be able to avoid the need to have to build both a website and a native application. It is common place for enterprise companies to have many desktop applications each with 3-4 mobile applications to support them.

Enterprise strategies differ from company to company. A fine example is The Times newspaper. They have focussed more on the optimum interactive experience of their native applications for both Apple and Android tablets, with separate editorial teams dedicated to each device. The website on the other hand is not responsive. They’ve not even bothered to redirect to an m.site, instead just displaying the desktop site on a mobile with a link to download the app from the app store.

In contrast to The Times, the Guardian has opted for a great adaptive/responsive website detailed in David’s aforementioned article from October 2013.

So is there a happy medium?

Cross Platform Tools

To tackle this problem, there are tools in the market that facilitate cross-platform mobile development such as Phonegap and Titanium. These allow you to build apps using Javascript and Web Technologies, and deploy them to multiple marketplaces in the guise of native apps, across multiple platforms. The advantages on the surface are obvious – you get access to native features that are not available to web browsers but you also only have to write and maintain one code base. If only it was that simple.

There is a great blog highlighting the comparison and the weakness of both Phonegap and Titanium by Kevin Whinnery here.

Other cross-platforms also exist. Another blog by Kevin Whinnery’s former colleague, Matt Schmulen provides details on the options and how they fit into the current mobile ecosystem where there is an ever increasing demand in the Enterprise.

These frameworks include:

PhoneGap/Cordova (HTML/JavaScript)

Titanium/Appcelerator (JavaScript)

Mono/Xamarin (C#)

Rhodes (Ruby)

Kony (Lua)

Our experience of these cross-platform mobile development tools is that you simply cannot replicate the native app experience. We have experimented with these tools before, an example being the build of the mobile applications for our BMW project using Phonegap. We found that the iPhone version of the app was great. However, getting an optimum experience on Android took a huge amount of effort in optimisation and testing to get it close (but still not close enough) to a native experience.

So what does the future hold?

Native App Development Is Dead in the Enterprise

This is a bold statement that will take some time to become completely true. However, 2015 is going to be the dawn of a new era of technology that will replace existing cross-platform tools such as Phonegap and Titanium with a much better offering that will finally succeed where Phonegap and Titanium have largely failed. This will be the beginning of the end of enterprises building responsive sites with multiple native applications to compliment them.

Responsive websites, with the help of new technology will form the basis of the code for native applications without hindering user experience. The applications will be fast and responsive, and there will be a single code base with very little device specific code.

What does this mean? Software companies like Red Badger that currently focus on the enterprise web (i.e. responsive web sites and not native applications) will also be able to deliver great native applications without a great deal of additional effort or the need to hire native app developers. Native application agencies are going to have to adapt and re-skill their employees in order to keep up, or face the consequences of withering into eventual obscurity. The winners will be the enterprise companies. They will have options available to them to build great experiences across web and native applications on multiple devices with close to a single code base. This means fewer applications, less maintenance, lower development costs and happier customers.

This will ultimately kill the question: “should I build native or responsive?”. Why choose when you can have it all?!

P.S. Where’s my proof you may ask? Watch this space.

UPDATE 2015/02/08: On 28th January, Facebook announced React Native at React Conf. React Native is a game changer and already answers the predictions made in this blog. You can view all of the videos from the conference here.

As I mentioned briefly in my blog post discussing the launch of the Badger Academy, I went to a retreat back in January to take some thinking time away from work. I was cut off from the outside world. There was no internet. Mobile phones were not allowed. Writing and talking was even banned. It was pretty extreme. But it proved to be an enlightening experience not least for coming up with a plethora of new ideas, many of which were strategic ideas on how Red Badger could be improved.

Out of the back of the retreat, I had lots of ideas, a Red Badger Charity Division being one of them. As discussed in greater detail in the Badger Academy blog post, the Charity Division was all about improving our ability to develop from within, developing young talent to become senior leaders in their field. After 6 months of developing the idea in my spare time and with my colleagues, the charity division has now been superseded by Badger Academy, but the objectives have passed verbatim from one to the other. The mechanism through which we achieve the objective has changed.

This isn’t the first time that cutting myself off from the outside world has resulted in new ideas. At Burning Man, an art festival in the middle of the Nevada Desert which is totally cut off from any wifi or phone signal, I thought about bringing in Non-Exec Directors to help advise Red Badger. The move to bring in Mike Altendorf as a Non-Exec is one of the best things we have ever done at Red Badger. He has helped us to become a much more mature business, faster, stopped us from making mistakes (that he had made in the past) and helped us to re-shape how we do sales.

Building product as part of a pitch (via a Hackathon) was also thought up at the same retreat as the Charity Division this January. This new lean approach to sales “The Proof is in the Pudding” helped us to win the biggest project in our history in May.

I think you get the point. Cutting off wifi and phone signal is important in fostering creativity. It’s become such a distraction in everyone’s lives. If you sit on a bus on the way to work and look around you, everyone’s head is buried in a digital screen. On the bus, people contemplate less, do less book reading and less talking to each other in general. However, more important than just cutting yourself off from wifi or the telephone, taking time out is about giving your mind the space to think creatively and you can’t do this with the distraction of everyday life; internet or no internet.

I’m not saying we wouldn’t have gotten to these decisions or ideas anyway. I expect Mike Altendorf would have joined our ranks eventually anyway. Or we might have started a Badger Academy eventually. I just don’t know. What I am sure of, is that it would have taken much longer had I not taken time out to just think.

Red Badger Founders Week

Reflecting on the value of the time I have had to myself, I have been doing some reading about it. It seems that taking time out is not uncommon. I watched a great 90’s documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds” in which Bill Gates talks about setting aside a week every year to read all of the books that he had in his “to read” list.

So I suggested to Dave and Stu that the three of us take a Founders Week, to do some more strategic thinking away from the day-to-day of running the business. After I suggested the idea, it became apparent that Dave had also already been considering taking a week, but to himself, not the three of us together. When suggesting we do it together, both Stu and Dave were sold immediately.

There is also a health aspect to taking time out. Michael Karnjanaprakorn is starting “Feast Retreats”. He says, Feast Retreats are for 20 people (max) where he will ban cell phone/WiFi usage throughout the weekend. “My goal is to share what I learned during my time off with The Feast community. There will be lots of yoga, healthy eating, and personal development to show the value and power of taking time off.”

All of the articles I have read about the power of time off can’t speak highly enough about the value it brings in promoting creative thinking, innovation and an increase in company productivity.

So, Stu, Dave and I are taking our first “Founders Week” at the end of November. We are going to book a cottage somewhere just outside of London, switch our phones off and take some time to ourselves. We’re not sure exactly what we’re going to do yet, but we all have books we want to read that we just haven’t had chance to yet, we’ll eat healthily and probably do some workshops. Apart from that, it’s just an opportunity to take some time to think, reflect and generally relax our minds.

The benefit I am sure will result in a rapid generation of new ideas that will impact Red Badger for years to come.

Back in January this year I went away for a 10 day retreat. The initial intention was to get away from work completely. No phone. No internet. No work. However, unexpectedly it ended up being incredibly conducive to coming up with a whole plethora of creative ideas. Some were non-work related but lots of new ideas were very much work related. (See this blog post I have written on Founders Week: The Importance of Taking Time Out). One of these ideas, in its rawest form was how we can source and develop young talent and turn them into very highly skilled developers, designers, project managers or whatever else. This has resulted in the quiet launch of Badger Academy this week.

A little bit of context

At Red Badger, a huge amount of investment goes into recruitment. Finding the best talent out there is difficult. As a company we hang our hat on quality, quality being the #1 Red Badger defining principle. As a result, we’re very fussy when it comes to hiring people. This I am in no doubt, will hold us in great stead for the future, so we are determined to maintain our standards in staff acquisition. But it poses a problem – how do we scale the business to service our ever increasing demands from a rapidly growing sales pipeline, without reducing quality?

I think the answer is to improve our ability to develop from within. So, we are hatching plans to invest heavily in developing young talent to become senior leaders in their field. We realise this will take time but Badger Academy is the first experiment that we hope will fulfill the overall objectives.

A Blueprint for Success

In the summer of 2011 when we were a much, much smaller business, we put out a job ad for a summer intern. Out of the 60 or so applicants, one Joe Stanton stood out head and shoulders above the rest. By the time he joined us, he had just started his 2nd year of Uni so worked with us for 8 hours a week. He had bags of talent but obviously lacked experience and as a Computer Science degree student, was being taught vital foundational knowledge stuff that you’d expect from a Computer Science Degree. However, he had no knowledge of modern web application engineering practices such as Behaviour Driven Development.

At the time, we had much more time to spend with Joe to ensure that he was doing things properly and with our guidance and his astute intellect, he developed his knowledge rapidly. He then had a gap year with us during which he was deployed and billed on real projects before going back to part-time for his final year of University. He graduated this summer and after a bit of travelling around Europe, he joined us permanently. On his first day, he was deployed onto a project as a billable resource having had almost 3 years of industry experience. He has hit the ground running in a way that most graduates would not be able to.

Joe has been a resounding success. The problem is how you scale this to develop multiple interns especially now that as a company, our utilisation is much higher. We can no longer spare the senior resources to spend the sort of time we could with Joe at the very beginning.

Joe Stanton – The Badger Academy Blueprint !!!

The Evolving Plan

When I was at the aforementioned retreat, my ideas were based around a project that we were just kicking off for an incredible charity – The Haller Foundation. We were embarking on a journey to build a responsive mobile web application to help farmers in Kenya realise the potential of the soil beneath their feet (For more info, search our previous blogs and look out for more info once the Haller website is officially launched later this year). What was key in my thinking was that we had planned for a mixture of experience in the project team which included two intern software engineers (one being Joe Stanton) that were working 2 days a week whilst completing their final year at Uni. We were delivering the project for free (so Haller were getting a huge amount of benefit) and we were training and developing interns at the same time. Win-win.

So, this formed the basis of my initial idea – The Red Badger Charity Division. We would use interns to deliver projects on a pro-bono basis for registered charities only. The charity would need to understand that this is also a vehicle for education and thus would need to be lax on their timelines and we would develop interns through real world project experience in the meantime. Although a great idea, this wasn’t necessarily practical. In the end, the Haller project required some dedicated time from some senior resources and cost us over £20K internally to deliver. A great cause but not a sustainable loss to build a platform for nurturing talent upon.

So, over several months after my retreat (7 to be exact) in-between many other strategic plans that were being put in place at Red Badger, with the help of my colleagues, I developed the idea further and widened its horizons.

Rather than being focussed on just charity projects (charity projects will remain part of the remit of the Badger Academy), we opened the idea out to other internal product development ideas as well. We also put a bit of thinking into how we could ensure the juniors get enough coaching from senior resources to ensure they are being trained properly.

Objective

Badger Academy’s primary objective is to train interns that are still at University who will be working part-time with a view to them having a certain level of experience upon graduation and hopefully joining Red Badger’s ranks. However, it may also extend to juniors who have already graduated (as a means to fast tracking them to a full-time job), graduates from General Assembly or juniors who have decided not to go to University.

It will require some level of experience. i.e. We will not train people from scratch. But once Badger Academy has evolved, the level of experience of participants will vary greatly. In the long term we envisage having a supply chain of interns that are 1st years, 2nd years, gap year students and 3rd years, all working at once.

Above is a diagram I drew back in April 2014 when initially developing the future strategy for Badger Academy. This has now been superseded and developed into a much more practical approach but the basic concept of where we want to get to still remains the same.

So what about the likes of General Assembly?

Badger Academy does not compete with the likes of General Assembly. We are working very closely with General Assembly, providing coaches for their courses and have hired several of their graduates. In fact, General Assembly fits in very nicely with Badger Academy. It is the perfect vehicle for us to hire a General Assembly graduate to fast track them over a period of 3 months until they are billable on projects. A graduate from General Assembly would generally not have been a viable candidate for Badger Academy prior to doing the General Assembly course. Like I say, all candidates need a certain level of experience beforehand. Badger Academy is not a grassroots training course.

Implementation

It is imperative that interns and juniors are trained by more senior resources. As a result we’ll be taking one senior resource for one day a week off of a billable project to dedicate their time to training the Badger Academy participants. To reduce impact on specific projects, we will rotate the senior coaches across multiple projects. We will also rotate by the three University terms. So for autumn term at Uni, we will have 3-4 senior coaches (all from separate projects) on weekly rotation until the end of the term. The spring term we will refresh the 3-4 coaches and again for the summer term. This way, everyone gets to teach, there is some consistency in tutors for the interns during term time and project impact is mitigated.

Summary

There will be a set syllabus of training topics for each discipline. As this is the first week, we have decided to build the syllabus as we go. Our current interns are both software engineers so we can imagine us getting pretty quickly into engineering practices such as testing strategy (E.g. BDD) but also other disciplines that are vital to delivering quality products such as Lean/Agile methodologies, devops and all of the other goodness that Red Badger practices daily.

This is an initial blog about our current activity but is light on detail. As this develops, we’ll formalise the approach and publish more insightful information of what this actually entails.

What we need to not lose sight of, is that this is an innovation experiment. We need to learn from it, measure our success (as well as our failures) and adapt. This is part of a long term strategy and we are just at the beginning.

Disclaimer: Red Badger reserves the right to change the name from Badger Academy. This has not been well thought through!

Red Badger have been working with Spree Commerce over the last 5 months on a commercial opportunity which resulted in me going over to New York for SpreeConf in February. I was literally blown away by the enthusiasm of the community. There was a genuine excitement about Spree from everyone there. On my return to London, I looked to join a Spree Meetup and realised there wasn’t one. So, decided to start one in London.

We’re genuinely excited about the platform and think it could help to change the retail landscape in the UK. So, hopefully through this User Group we can help build the community, build more open source extensions and all collaborate to make the platform better.

The presentations

We had 4 presentations for the evening:

First up was Josh Resnik, COO of Spree Commerce who had flown in from Washington DC to help kick the user group off. He presented on 2 key themes. The first was Spree as a company. Given the acquisitions of Magento by Ebay and Hybris by SAP, a few retailers have been nervous of Spree going down the same corporate route. So Josh covered this topic in his presentation. Second was where Spree fits in the marketplace and why you should choose it as your platform.

The second presentation was by Joe Simms, CTO of Surfdome. Surfdome are currently re-platforming to Spree Storefront and Spree Hub and will be the UK’s largest implementation on the platform. Joe covered why they chose Spree, their experience to date, what they are currently working on (specifically some really complicated stuff around pricebooks) and what they would like to work on with the community to improve the platform.

Third, David and I, both founders of Red Badger, talked about a hackathon that we did recently to build a store for a target client based on Spree in just 2 days. I discussed the process we went through during the hackathon and David discussed what was needed to build the store before presenting a demo of the end product.

Finally, Peter Berkenbosch a Spree Software Engineer based in the Netherlands, did a presentation on the Spree Hub, the new Spree Hub User Interface that has recently gone live and then did a demo of the Spree Hub, building webhooks, events and flows as well as how you debug.

Summary

I think overall the first event was a great success. We had a turn out of about 40 people which is not bad for a first user group. The people that were in attendance were really enthusiastic and interested in the presentations and the buzz about the Badger office was great.

It was awesome to have commitment from Spree to help us kick this off with Josh coming in from Washington DC and Peter from the Netherlands. With support from them, we should be able to make this User Group a success.

Our objective is to build up the Spree Commerce community in London.

Next Steps

Given that we’ve just started this user group we’ll keep it quarterly for now so that we can ensure quality content. So, we’ll look to get the next one ready for early September.

If anyone has feedback or has general ideas about what we should do with the next user group, please contact ideas@red-badger.com.

I’d like to look at different possibilities, perhaps doing a hackathon to build new extensions to Spree etc…

We will also be looking for presenters so if you are working with Spree already and would be interested in doing a talk, then please do get in touch. We don’t have to stick to the 20 minute presentation format so can accommodate a number of 5 minute lightning talks as well.

Red Badger are always looking at new ways of working with regard to our tech stack as well as our process engineering methods. Our focus is on helping our clients to realise benefit as quickly as possible.

We’re always looking at where different business verticals have big problems that need to be solved in a smarter way. One such problem that is obvious is the retail sector. Retailers spend a fortune on implementing their e-commerce stores and are often faced with huge problematic programmes that go-live in a big bang release that goes wrong from day 1.

John Lewis spent £40m on a new e-com platform based on ATG Oracle delivered by Deloitte. This took years to implement with a big bang approach at the end of the project. When like John Lewis, you are selling £1bn revenue online, that is a long time and a lot of expenditure before you can start to realise value.

John Lewis CIO Paul Coby said the new platform is considered to be one of the default choices for his industry. “ATG is one of the two or three standard platforms for e-commerce in retail.”

“It will give us nothing fundamentally different initially, as we want a smooth transition. The aim is to give us another 10 years of upward development. For example, how we then integrate mobile and social media and new search engines into the site is going to be key.”

TEN YEARS!! And £40m that gives you nothing fundamentally different.

Delivering these programmes are also not without big problems. £40m for John Lewis’ website is expensive but at least that was what the programme was budgeted at. Another large (to remain nameless) retailer ended up spending six times their original budget for their e-com re-platform onto IBM Websphere Commerce resulting in a cost to date of several 10′s of £millions.

This is quite typical of retailers. Go with what everyone else is doing, feel the pain and spend the cash (because it is seen as the safe bet). Paul Coby is delivering what will be considered a very successful, large scale project that may also be the perfect solution for their organisation. However, for many scenarios, surely there is a better way to deliver E-com solutions?

New Technology (and Open Source)

In recent years the speed at which technology has improved has been incredible. The development of open source software has been particularly impressive. If you speak to Stu he has some strong thoughts on this. His opinion is that Github has been massively influential in how people develop software and the speed at which it is developing as a result. The biggest companies (Oracle, IBM et al) just cannot adapt at the speed at which the collective open source community can (The speed at which things are moving takes a lot of effort to stay on top of the latest greatest. But, it’s worth it!).

Large companies are starting to embrace open source. Several of our clients have allowed us to develop large enterprise applications for them using a modern open source tech stack (Node.js, Ruby, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, LiveScript, Component etc, etc…). Walmart are now building all of their mobile commerce applications based on Node.js. They are making a strategic investment in Node.js transitioning from a core Java solution with a vision of revolutionising retail through technology.

Unfortunately Walmart are certainly an exception to the norm in retail. The attitude of using a “default choice” for e-commerce seems to be the norm and with it comes all of the pain and expense.

An opportunity to do things correctly

We have recently had an opportunity to deliver a complete re-platform of a heritage retailer’s e-commerce website. This retailer had no desire to use a huge monolithic solution such as ATG or Websphere Commerce. However, they have been looking at the following options as serious contenders.

Magento – Magento is (was) an open source platform built on old technology (PHP) and is incredibly slow. It has got so large (8.2million lines of code) that it has ground to a halt. It has only 8 open source contributors. That’s 1 million lines of code per contributor! Back in 2011 it was also acquired by Ebay effectively incorporating it as a standalone venture. Who knows what is going to happen to it but if it is to make a comeback, Ebay will need to invest heavily in product development to effectively rebuild it from the ground up.

Hybris – Is a Java based (Spring Framework) and has now been bought by SAP. With SAP focusing on a B2B model and immediately hiking the license fees for Hybris, the future of Hybris as a platform for retailers is unknown.

Demandware – Built using DMS Script, a proprietary code base based on JavaScript. If you use Demandware, you have the problem of vendor lock-in as it takes specialist skills to manage and update. It also has a license model of 2-3 % of your website’s annual turnover. Depending on the scale of your business, that can build up to a hell of a lot of money over a long period of time and isn’t great if you have a CAPEX oriented business model like our potential client does.

Looking at these three options, we quickly discounted any of them as a viable platform for the opportunity that was on our table. We wanted to do this right with modern, flexible, scalable technology that could be delivered quickly and cheaper to provide the client with real value, allowing them to realise benefit as soon as possible. The client was open to suggestions. They wanted their new solution to enforce their brand, and bring it firmly into the 21st century by being innovative with both technology and delivery methodology.

As a result, we did lots of research around e-com platforms to see if we could find something that fitted our criteria. During our research we came across Spree Commerce.

Enter Spree Commerce

Kicking off the Spree Hackathon

Since finding Spree Commerce, we have been delving deeply into research into the platform (we have just finished a 2 day weekend Hackathon building a store from scratch. More about that in future blogs) and like what we see. Spree storefront is a Ruby-on-Rails open source application. Here are some quick at a glance facts about Spree:

It has nearly 500 active contributors to the project which puts it in the top 50 open source projects in the world (out of approximately 3 million total)

It has approximately 50,000 lines of code to date (about 100 per contributor)

There are already over 20,000 stores on the platform globally

It’s had over 225,000 downloads

Any Ruby developer can modify the software to meet their store’s exact needs — no proprietary programming skills needed

The storefront supports responsive web design out of the box for a great user experience. It also has a complete feature set across Product Catalogue, Marketing & Promotions, Payments, Shipping, Site Management & SEO, Checkout, International Features (such as multi-currency) and Analytics & Reporting.

Spree Hub

As well as the Open Source Spree Commerce Storefront, Spree provide a managed software as a service Spree Commerce Hub. This is basically a message broker that integrates seamlessly with the Storefront. It effectively decouples your Storefront from complex back-end integration and automates all of the logistics between the two. There are lots and lots of out of the box back-end integrations and they continue to grow.

The Spree Hub is fully managed as a service by Spree Commerce so comes at a cost, albeit a very competitive cost. It’s also a yearly license fee that is fixed, so the cost doesn’t escalate depending on the scale of your business (like Demandware).

The Storefront combined with Spree Hub is a very, very compelling option for how to deliver e-commerce platforms smarter. After this weekends hackathon, Red Badger will definitely be recommending it as the way forward to our retail clients.

We are excited by how we can approach building enterprise scale e-commerce platforms, delivering them at a fraction of the cost of other platforms and delivering it incredibly quickly using methodologies such as Kanban and Continuous Deployment. We’re looking forward to using Spree to integrate to the likes of Elasticsearch and then contributing our code back into the community. We’ll be using The Spree Hub as a message broker too. Our clients tend to be large and have the usual complex back-end systems such ERP, Logistics and Fullfillment. In general the integration of many systems is made much easier through Spree. The API in the storefront will allow us to easily integrate native apps as well as a responsive web front-end because they will effectively just be consuming the same data.

The proposal is compelling. At Red Badger, we don’t think there is a better E-com solution than Spree Commerce out there at the moment.

Spree Conf

As part of my investigations into Spree Commerce, I went to SpreeConf in New York in late Feb to meet the community, find out more about the platform and see who is using it and how (I’ll write a separate blog summarising the conference itself so will keep this section short).

At the conference I was blown away by the enthusiasm and energy of the community. Everyone is genuinely excited about what they can do on the platform.

Two key speeches that I’ll mention now were from Antonio Silveira – VP Engineering at GoDaddy (who have just announced their partnership with Spree) and Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos who are replatforming to Spree but have also just released their female clothing line Ayr.com in just 96 days for first release.

GoDaddy have a platform upon which 60,000 E-com stores are based. This is on an aging tech stack that is getting a complete overhaul. At the core of this will be Spree Commerce. Interestingly, Antonio stated the following as the key factors in GoDaddy choosing Spree Commerce as their platform:

Community – Their activity on Github, how many people are committing etc…

Quality – Spree’s code base and Ruby-on-Rails being higher quality than the competition

Amazing feature set

Vision

Andy Dunn shared the vision sentiment. Basing most of his talk on why E-com is bad business he finished by saying “Spree is here to save the day in transforming e-com”.

Both of these are very compelling views from the guys that are already doing it with regard to Spree Commerce.

Summary

As a company Red Badger are very excited about Spree. We feel we can bring something new to the table for our retail clients, both present and future, to help remove the pain and cost that is typically felt by using a “default choice”.

The Spree community is incredible. Spree clients are customising Spree to fix problems they experience (be it an integration to Elasticsearch or a CMS) and with the help of Spree Commerce these are finding their way back into the product. Companies that could be seen as being competitors are sharing their code and their learnings (We had a developer from Rails Dog join us for the Spree Hackathon at our offices this weekend) in true open source fashion. All of this results in a great product, that is improving rapidly and everyone benefits.

Watch this space on updates on our Hackathon and more blogs about our learnings with Spree Commerce.

We have also started a London Spree User Group at our offices to see if we can generate more interest in the open source community here in London and to share war stories.

Hopefully we’ll be delivering our first projects on the platform soon so we’ll keep you updated on that too. We’re looking forward to getting involved with the community, contributing back and making e-commerce a much nicer space to be playing in.

Ref: Spree Commerce Sites

See below for some examples of some nice Spree Commerce sites that are live. I think you’ll agree the user experience and design of these sites are delightful and all are responsive.

We have recently delivered a project for Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) to re-design and build their World Risk Review website. We’re currently in the final hardening sprint, doing some bug fixing and UAT. We’ll be able to talk more about the benefits in a case study, once the site has been live for a while and we can look at the analytics. In the mean-time I want to discuss some of the great bits of innovation (both tech and process) we have produced in delivering this project, which was just 8 weeks in total with only 6 weeks of development.

What is World Risk Review?

World Risk Review is a country risk ratings modelling tool that JLT founded in 2006, providing corporations, banks and other organisations involved with international trade and investments with an assessment of short to medium term country risk. This allows users to build well informed strategies to manage political, security and economic risks.

JLT is the only Insurance Broker to have invested in this capability in-house so they required a really modern website that would allow users of World Risk Review to have an intuitive and highly informative experience when consuming JLT’s expert advice.

What did we do?

World Risk Review is made up of three key areas – peril ratings data for each country, key insights (articles, insights, reports and blogs) and news. Red Badger’s role was to make these three areas easily accessible, engaging and informative. With more and more devices being used in the financial services sector, it would also need to work on tablet and mobile. So as well as being visually rich, the site would also need to be lightweight with regard to page size so that it remains speedy on mobile devices.

We designed the site using a visually rich set of dashboards to allow users to consume the data in a really intuitive way, compare different types of data and perform country comparisons. This is underpinned with easy navigation throughout the site via the dashboards and a flexible and fast search function.

How did we do it?

The site is effectively made up of two applications. The main website and a custom built admin console which consists of an analytics section as well as a custom built content management system (CMS) that provides the ability to do inline editing of content, preview of changes and deployment straight into the live environment.

I am not a techie, so I’ll ask the developers of the site to produce some more technical blogs with more detail (They promise me these are to follow!). However, below is a brief outline of how we delivered the project.

The tech

For the visual dashboards we used D3.js. D3.js is a JavaScript library designed to bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. It is based on web standards. It is efficient, flexible, lightweight (which means it is fast) and the animations and interactions look and feel beautiful. The front-end is then underpinned by a Node.js server application stack (Any JavaScript run outside of the browser is run on Node.js including the admin console, APIs and Livescript – see below) and a powerful search function built using Elasticsearch. We have built an incredibly fast search based on tags, allowing flexible filtering of data with some advanced features such as “did you mean” suggestions.

My co-founder Stuart is a huge fan of Component (read his blog) so the website is built using components in almost every way you could use them, from just packaging bits of JavaScript, through custom UI elements (such as the autocomplete tag field which we vastly improved – public repo can be found here. We also improved the datepicker component – public repo here) to whole pages being rendered by a hierarchy of components. All client side JavaScript we use in the website is packaged as components, including the visualisation code. The benefit of building a site in this way, is that it is ruthlessly efficient and every bit of code that is contained in the application has a use. You build lots of little tiny modules that are great at doing one thing and then you hook them all together.

We also switched from CoffeeScript to Livescript to compile our JavaScript by writing in a functional way. The developers on the project find it really nice to use. It has tons of little tools for the typical boring tasks you do all the time and also has a lot of functional programming features, including the amazing prelude-ls, which make it ideal for data processing, such as the static site generator (see below).

Last year we re-built red-badger.com as a static site. We loved the results so decided to follow a similar technical architecture for World Risk Review. The static site generation architecture deploys the site at the time that content is updated so that when users access the site, they are accessing a very simple static page rather than requesting content from a database for each action. The result is a website that is more secure and can serve pages much faster than traditional Content Management Systems (such as Drupal). The site is deployed to an Amazon S3 bucket and distributed via Cloudfront to 51 edge locations around the globe. Originally we were using Docpad as our static site generator (as we had for red-badger.com) but we found it started to really slow us down so we built our own static site generator which brought down the time it takes to generate the HTML from the source markdown documents and Jade layouts from about 90 to about 6 seconds . This allowed us to work much faster and also enabled us to build a CMS where you could preview your changes almost in real-time. Having tested the application around the globe, it is incredibly fast wherever you are, with as little as 10 milliseconds and no more than 300 milliseconds to the first byte.

We have also set-up continuous delivery using Travis CI and Ansible. This is incredibly important for how we develop software but it also underpins how we have architected the CMS. Using continuous delivery allowed us to commit changes into a staging environment many times a day and made them available to test immediately. In the production environment, once the project is live, the content editor will be able to deploy their changes in the CMS straight into the live environment. The custom CMS is built on Git. An administrator can view the site as if they are a user, but can edit any element on the page, save it and then review comprehensive line-by-line changes to each document (or add new documents such as news items). Once they are happy with the changes, a publish button will commit to Git and will deploy into live. It allows multiple users to edit the site at the same time without stepping on each other’s toes and merges their changes in a smart way, so content management is not a race of who saves first anymore. In order to build in-line editing we were looking at a number of options such as CreateJS. However, we again decided to build our own editing tool using Javascript components for YAML and Front-matter.

The final piece of the puzzle and by no means the least important, was to build in analytics. Using the power of Elasticsearch, we built a tag based analytics tool that allows JLT to monitor user behaviour on the site. They can add custom tags to each user (such as “watch list”), filter, sort and search. This gives JLT a quantitative view of customers behaviour to allow them to adapt their future strategy around what their customers want.

The process

Given that we had only 8 weeks to deliver the project of which 6 weeks were for development, we decided to use Kanban as the methodology of choice, reducing as much friction in process as possible and allowing the developers to do exactly that – develop. The backlog was tightly managed by Sinem (the project manager) and the product owner from JLT who was deployed full-time to sit with us in our office every day. I cannot stress how important it was having the product owner integrated into the team full-time. We managed user stories on a Kanban Board and although physical boards are great, the developers managed all tasks in Github. This reduced duplication of effort, increasing productivity. Stand-ups each morning were held around the Kanban board, talking about what we had been doing at story level and we were focussed on getting stories through to delivery as soon as possible so used WIP limits to streamline the process.

To ensure quality control, we used Github flow to manage the process of building new features, ensuring that no piece of code is deployed without first going through code review by a 2nd pair of eyes. There are some simple rules to Github Flow: 1) Anything in the master branch is deployable. 2) To create something new, you create a new branch off of master. 3) You continue to commit to that branch locally until your feature is complete. 4) When you think your feature is complete, you raise a pull request. 5) Another developer then reviews your code and upon sign-off it can be merged to master. 6) Continuous Deployment then deploys your changes immediately.

When delivering a project at this speed, it is paramount that your features are tested properly. To do this, we integrate a tester into the team and get them to test as soon as a feature is deployed. In the past we have used separate tools such as Youtrack as our bug management system. However, in this project, we switched to Github issues. Having one central place for the developers to see all features and bugs together in Github has most certainly helped productivity of the team.

Summary

In just 6 weeks of development we achieved an incredible amount. We had an integrated team of Project Management, UX, Design, Dev and Test, all dependent on constant communication to get the job done. We built an exceptionally well designed, useable site on a really innovative tech stack. The use of Kanban, Github Flow and Github Issues proved to be an incredibly productive way to deliver the project. It was a very intense environment of rapid delivery but was lots of fun too. JLT were a great client not just in allowing us to be innovative with our tech and process, but also in the efforts they put in to make this collaborative. We couldn’t have delivered so quickly without their constant involvement.

As always, there is room for improvement in our process and the tech team are looking forward to new technology emerging such as those contained in the Web Components spec. Our project retrospective has highlighted some areas for improvement and we will continue to iterate our process, always pushing to try and provide our clients with better value. We have loads of great ideas about how the World Risk Review site can be improved in future phases but after 8 weeks, it is currently in a great place to deliver a far improved experience for both JLT’s customers and their admin staff.

I’m very excited about a project that we are currently working on for The Haller Foundation and want to take this opportunity to talk about the amazing work they do and what we are doing to help.

The Haller Foundation

The Haller Foundation was setup to continue the work of the environmentalist, Dr. Rene Haller. Its fundraising branch is run out the UK with all funds focussed on its efforts in Africa, mostly in the rural areas of the Kisuani district. Haller’s focus is on helping farmers to realise the potential of the land beneath their feet by training them in life-skills, ultimately leading them to build better self-sufficient and sustainable lives. Their programmes include education, water, farmer training, health, alternative energy, nano-enterprise and the Bustani Urban Garden, an education centre that shows people how to use rural farming techniques in small urban spaces.

To meet the volunteers who make this happen and to see what they are achieving is a wonderful thing. We’ll be going out to Kenya to see it first hand in the next couple of months, something we are incredibly excited about.

What are we doing?

Alongside Haller, we are working very closely with Pearlfisher, a London and New York based design agency (Jonathan Ford, founding partner of Pearlfisher is a trustee of The Haller Foundation) to build a mobile web site that will support the activities of Haller in Africa. There is a surprising amount of mobile devices in Kenya, which as a country has a great deal of disruptive digital innovation (Research by RIA shows that over 60% of Kenyans use mobile phones as a method of payment). With so many mobile devices in the hands of Kenyans, in both urban and rural areas it makes perfect sense to utilise the potential of mobile to create a web application that works across multiple devices to put the power of Haller’s content into the hands of the people.

The Haller Foundation, Pearlfisher and Red Badger are working together to produce an application that provides real value that helps Haller to distribute digital content to as many people as possible. Taking key learnings from the existing Haller programmes, the project objective is to increase the reach of the Haller techniques and bring even more economic security to poor, small-holder farmers. With Pearlfisher building the vision and content strategy, Red Badger are providing the user experience, visual design and development of the application.

How are we doing it?

Being a charity that is run mostly by volunteers, the investment available to hire a consultancy to build a web application is limited. So we had to be creative and look at ways in which we could afford, as a small tech consultancy, to free up resources to be able to run this pro-bono project. Using a mixture of senior resources we have also supplemented the team with part-time junior resources that are still at University. An opportunity arose with this project to use it to develop junior resources, preparing them with key skills once they graduate. Haller are fully supportive of us using junior resources on the project and are relaxed on delivery timelines. So as well as building an application for a great cause, we are also using the project to develop young developers, providing them with new opportunities for a career.

Next steps…

There is lots of work to do. We are making great progress with the first version of the app. We’ll also be going to Kenya to see the Haller operation first hand, to meet the farmers and to do some usability testing on the application. We’ll use the feedback from the testing and feed it in to the next iterations of the application.

We’ll be blogging on the progress of the app dev (with the Uni students talking about what they are learning), of the visit to Kenya and everything else to do with the progress of this project.

The whole team is genuinely excited to be part of a project that could provide benefit to so many. Working with The Haller Foundation is truly inspiring. Perhaps we’ll use this project as a platform for doing similar pro-bono projects for other charities and developing young talent in the process. Watch this space…

To avoid repeating what has been said in previous posts, I’m going to keep this blog as short as possible.

As announced by David in his July post, we have been planning to open source XPF – our layout framework for XNA, for a little while. Jaco Geldenhuys and Jonathan Dickinson have been working around their busy schedules to get the code ready for a public release. We are delighted to announce that this has now been completed and our Github Repository is public.

What next?

XPF is now open to everyone so please go ahead and start to play. If you want to contribute, all the details on how are up on the Github wiki as well as the repository rules and license details. Jaco and Jon will also be doing some work in the developer community to try and attract some potential contributors.

To help you to get started. the Getting Started With XPF blog post has been uploaded to the Github wiki but there are also some historical XPF posts on our blog that are not yet uploaded so you may find some of those useful.

Any new documentation and/or announcements will now be made on the Github wiki rather than our blog. This will avoid the need to retrospectively update old blog posts that are no longer relevant.

So that’s about it! We look forward to seeing how the community can take XPF forward in developing it further. Happy coding!